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ClassBadges is a new way to help reward student achievement in the classroom. The idea is simple. Teachers sign up for a free account with ClassBadges.com, create a class and add their students. Whenever a student achieves a noteworthy landmark in their learning, the teacher can award that student a badge to recognize their success and help track their progress. Students have a unique class code that lets them log in to the site and view their latest badges. No more sticker charts on the wall!

Creating a badge is easy. Click on the Add Badge button and give your badge a title and a description. Then choose an image to associate with your badge from the wide variety of built-in icons. Once created, you can award it to the students you want to assign it to in your class, and even remove it at a later date if necessary.

As a concept, it certainly looks to have some similarities with other motivational tools like ClassDojo, but it seems to focus less on behavior and more on academic milestones or achievements. It won’t replace a teacher’s gradebook, but it could be a nice way to keep track of what stage students are at on a project, or as a motivational tool for a book club or homework chart.

Right now, ClassBadges is so new that you have to sign up to request an invite, but because I am already a member, I can expedite your application if necessary. Simply sign up at ClassBadges.com and then leave your details in a comment below, or send me a message via my contact form, and I will email the site owners with your info. You you can get a better idea of what this site has to offer by watching the video below.

Mac readers may be familiar with the website twodollartues.com, a site that lets you sign up for notifications about apps from the Mac App Store that go on sale for just $2 every Tuesday. There are some good deals to be had, and savings of 50-90% are not uncommon on a wide range of apps.

Well, recently I got word that the same site is branching out to iPad apps. Starting November 7, the site will be offering a selection of iPad apps for just $1 every Wednesday. There is no word yet on the type of apps this will include, but if they include the same type of variety that I have seen for the Mac apps, there could well be some useful educational offerings in here for teachers and students. You can expect similar discounts of 50-90% off the normal price, and you can sign up for email notifications so that you know when they are available at the discounted rate.

While $1 is cheap and will likely yield a lot of great results, you still can’t beat free! So, remember that Apple has a free app of the week, with a new app announced every Thursday. Most of them have been games so far, but there have been a few useful photo apps too. Look for the App of the Week banner on the Featured section of your iOS App Store.

There are a growing number of 1:1 districts in Iowa, and a variety of devices are being deployed in these districts. The Macbook is very popular, as are PC laptops and iPads, but what about the Chromebook? Is it a viable device for schools? Google certainly seems to think so. In fact, it recently announced that it was currently being used in over 500 school districts in the USA and Europe.

Courtesy of Samsung.com

Here in Iowa, Council Bluffs has deployed 4,300 Chromebooks. In South Carolina, Richmond School District has 19,000 Chromebooks, while another 3,500 are found at Leyden High School in Illinois. It has a ways to go in order to come close to the inroads made by the iPad or even the Macbook, but as a portable, viable device, it is catching on quick. Chromebooks in education are a growing force.

Device management is a major plus. The Google Dashboard console is easy to navigate, intuitive to use, and has almost all the options that schools are looking for with mobile device management software. When you compare this to what you would have to do to manage a collection of iPads, there really is little comparison. Apple’s Configurator is a great start, but it is not without its faults and random bugs.

I’ve been using a Samsung Series 5 550 for about a week now, and I have to admit that I really enjoyed using it. It is quick to start up, and even quicker to resume from sleep. The battery life is decent, but maybe not quite as good as it could be for classroom use. The Chrome OS has evolved well over the last few months, and there is an increasing number of offline apps available so you can still check your mail, write notes, or browse your calendar and docs without a wi-fi connection.

Does it take time adjusting to the Chrome OS? Absolutely, but if you are a Google Apps school, the transition will not be as big as you might think. There are apps for almost anything you want to do now, so Chromebooks in education are becoming more relevant by the day, especially with the introduction of the new $249 Samsung Chromebook that weighs less than 2.5lbs and has a battery rated for 6.5 hours of continuous use.

So, are you considering Chromebooks in your school district? What are the pros and cons that you have come up against while weighing up the merits of this platform?

The second of my two presentations at ITEC 2012 this year was Digital Storytelling Apps for the iPad. I love the potential that the iPad has as a multimedia device for creating and sharing digital stories, so I wanted to try and encapsulate some of the best ways to do that in this presentation.

The apps I chose will not necessarily be new to everyone, but I chose these apps because each is just that little bit different in their own way. Each one either pertains to a different strand of digital storytelling, or was built for a specific age level to help make digital storytelling relevant and meaningful to all ages of students.

So, if you are looking for a collection of digital storytelling apps to use in your classroom, take a look at the slides below. There are many more I would have added if I were not restricted to a 50-minute session, but these apps are a great start for K-12 educators who are looking to explore digital literacy with the iPad.

Are your favorites included in this slideshow? If not, leave a comment below with a list of your own favorite storytelling apps for the iPad.

Recently, I attended ITEC 2012 -Iowa’s premier technology conference for educators. David Pogue and Marco Torres were the keynote speakers, but there were dozens of other excellent breakout sessions over the course of this three-day event.

I myself had the opportunity to present twice, so I opted for a couple of iPad sessions that I had been wanting to talk about for some time now, and I have included the slides to the first of these two sessions below – iPad Workflow Solutions for Educators.

A digital workflow for the iPad, or the process of getting student work to and from the device, has long been a subject of some consternation among those who use iPads in the classroom. Why? The reason is simple. Apple did not build the iPad for a school environment. It was designed for an individual. As such, it was designed to be managed by an individual, with little real thought about how that individual could interact with other users.

Thankfully, this is beginning to change. Apple is less restrictive that it once was. It has loosened the reins a little with iOS and it is now actively working to help develop mobile device management software like Apple Configurator. My presentation at ITEC was designed to reflect that, and it includes some of the latest changes and developments that have been made to the iOS ecosystem.

So, feel free to take a look at some of the options that are available to you if you use iPads in the classroom. A fully digital workflow is possible on the iPad, but it is not always as intuitive as it might be. The slides here do not always tell the whole story, because of the nature of a slideshow presentation, so if you want or need any further information on any of these methods, please do not hesitate to leave a comment below.

So, here I am again. The first post of a new blog, and a new adventure starts right here, right now. It’s my (welcome) return to blogging.

I’ve blogged before on Weebly, WordPress and (briefly) Blogger, all under the banner of The Education Technology Blog, but now I have my own name at the top of the page, and it feels right. The kind of content I will post here will likely be similar to what I did before on previous blogs – technology tools for teachers that are designed to advance and enhance teaching and learning in the classroom.

What will that include? Well, iPad apps, Google Apps, Web 2.0, mobile learning tips, 1:1 deployment strategies, and more will no doubt quickly populate the posts on this blog, because these are the tools and ideas that the teachers I work with are desperate to hear more about, and these are the things that I am most passionate about as an educator.

Consequently, if you like what you see here, feel free to follow me on Twitter, or subscribe to this blog, and together we can work to make a difference for 21st century educators everywhere.

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